Children often carry the behaviors they develop in the first few years of their lives throughout their lives. However, it can be incredibly challenging to mold their behaviors and help them retain healthy habits. One of the biggest areas where parents experience difficulty is when it comes to eating habits. You’ll often find your kids reaching eagerly for sugary, chemical-laden foods and tossing away the greens at any chance they get.
However, this challenge is multiplied twofold for parents of children on the Autism Spectrum or with other neurodevelopmental disorders. These children often react much more negatively to new or non-preferred foods, and it can be a challenge to get them to eat clean. If you’re facing trouble getting your children to eat clean, you may benefit from working with a behavioral analyst.
Behavioral therapy is often incredibly effective when dealing with such issues and can bring long-lasting change. If you’re interested in learning more about behavioral analysts and feeding therapy, keep reading below.
1. Help Introduce a Reward System
One of the primary tenants of behavioral therapy is that it works on a reinforcement-based system. Reinforcements can be positive or negative and encourage children to repeat desirable behaviors. Punishments can also be positive or negative and discourage them from repeating disliked actions. Introducing a reward system can be incredibly effective in pushing your kids to adopt healthy eating consistently.
However, it can be challenging to enforce such a system alone. Behavioral therapy is a proper intervention that requires intensive training to enforce properly. Behavioral analysts need to carefully analyze the client’s individual needs, work empathically, and design tailored solutions for the best results. Behavioral analysts carry out all this and much more.
Moreover, people going for therapy the first time can ask questions like what does a behavior analyst do? And how can they help kids? They can help the child develop adaptive behaviors with time and move towards a healthier diet. Furthermore, they can also help improve communication and life quality for children.
2. Help Keep Your Kids Involved
One of the biggest mistakes parents make when preparing healthy meals for kids is that they fail to consider their children’s preferences. Healthy eating doesn’t need to mean tasteless, bland meals that don’t attract kids at all. Children expect meal times to be fun and delicious, and it’s up to you to figure out how to incorporate health amongst them.
One of the best ways to encourage children to take an active interest in healthy eating is by keeping them involved in the process. Based on your child’s interests, a behavioral therapist can help you figure out how to keep your children engaged in the process. It can be by teaching them about healthy eating, taking them along for grocery shopping, or lending a hand in meal prep. These actions can create a valuable learning opportunity for your kids and help them retain healthier eating. Moreover, children learn most about food through observation and giving them such positive experiences can be incredibly useful.
3. Give Them Choices
Another mistake that parents often make is they start offering a very restrictive menu. Sometimes you might feel it’s only safe for your kids to have a vegan or gluten-free diet. Still, limiting their choices can create an incredibly oppressive environment for them. Behavioral analysts understand that children on the autism spectrum can often feel a need to control their environment. A restrictive menu can prevent them from feeling in control.
Instead, let your kids have a choice in what they eat if you want them to enjoy healthy food actively. However, it’s also necessary not to provide too much variety and to overwhelm the child. Instead, let them pick from pairs. You can ask your children to pick which vegetable or fruits they’d like to eat today or how they would like them to be cooked. Furthermore, you can make the eating experience as interactive as possible too. Allowing kids to pick their favorite utensils to eat can also help them feel more control of this novel experience.
4. Bring About Gradual Change
When introducing a healthy eating regimen to the family, it’s normal for parents to come off as a bit too overzealous. You might want to throw out all the sugary carbs in one day, but such change can be incredibly jarring for your kids. Children with neurodevelopmental issues often follow strict routines. Even the smallest change can alarm them immensely and trigger a breakdown. To introduce healthy eating in such restrictive schedules, you need to bring about gradual change.
A behavioral analyst can help you understand how to introduce new foods to your children’s diet. It can be a painstaking process, but you can have excellent results if you stick with it. You can start by introducing one new food item first and helping them get used to it. You can gradually build tolerance by allowing your child first to touch the food, to smell the food, and then working towards eating it.
Conclusion
Making your kids ditch the sugary foods can seem like an uphill battle. Still, with a behavioral analyst’s help, you can accomplish the task easily. They can help you understand the minutiae of your children’s actions and can help you move around them easily. With time, you can reinforce healthy eating for the long run and help your kids lead a much more fulfilling life.